And generally any other makeup counter with a helpful lady behind it, trying to give me 'useful' advise on foundation is -
....
......
........
They end pushing either orangey or too-dark foundations on me.
This tragedy can strike you even if you listen to all those MUA gurus in Youtube, who advises us on picking the right color foundation for our skin tone.
Note: This is probably a post for women of color like me, especially of South Asian origin or descent ( i.e. India etc).
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| Courtesy: Pixabay.com |
Not saying everyone faced this problem. Not saying anything against orangey or dark foundation, if that is what you want and like. And lastly I am not trying to come off as 'pro-whitening' that is so vogue in Asian countries.
All am saying is - my face is a mosaic of skin tones and usually I find that most Sales Assistants in Sephora and other beauty department stores end up pushing foundations in the darkest of my skin tones at me, making my face, neck and decollete all in different colors. This has happened so many times. I try telling the SA that what I want is probably something that would not just match my chin or one small area of my face, but my entire face and neck and possibly lower, but they never seem to get it.
The last straw for me, was the nice lady at Sephora who tried pushing a Bare Minerals foundation at me. Let me be very honest - she was super nice. But she kept trying to tell me my 'perfect' shade was a foundation shade that only matched my lower chin, but was too orangey and dark for rest of my face. In fact, after she did a demo, I looked so weird that she didn't argue much when I said, "Sorry No Way".
Weird? Is it just me who has this problem of having a mosaic skin tone and wondering which shade would go with most of the face? I dont think so, cos I've seen and heard similar problems from my other S-Asian friends, so I hope I am speaking for a good-sized population here.
I was discussing this strange phenomenon with my MUA friend when she explained it to me and it was like seeing the Light. And it made sense, so much sense!
Reasons are (as per her and as per me now):
1. Most white women go for a slightly tanned look and hence prefer a slightly darker tone for their foundation. Since a lot of SAs in Sephora and other dept stores and MUA Youtube gurus are of fairer even skin tones, their choices and way of choosing becoming a general guideline which the rest of us end up adopting.
2. We all suffer from pigmentation. But the way it affects us varies by skin tone. Fair skinned (white) ladies get freckles etc. Olive/Brown skin tones like mine gets dark patches which ends up making parts of our face in a different tone(like for me, my under-eye area is fairest while my under-chin is darkest). It is not targeted like a freckle and cant easily be covered by concealer.
Makes sense? It did to me.
So now what?
Now, you can chose to look at the foundations you bought and didnt work for you and see it in a new light.
What I do now? I find that I need to mix my foundations (I get a dark and a light shade in my fav formula and mix them to my right consistency) , apply a corrector around my darker patches and generally smile & ignore the shade advise I get from SAs here.
Another change I noticed was - I ended up using concealer much less and corrector (yellow and peach shade) more.
And it works.
Tell me what you think - did this make sense to you?
